BENGALURU: Virtual realitytech startups are increasingly eyeing content production for a diverse range of brands from banks to films, especially with 360-degree VR videos becoming increasingly popular among Indian brands over the last year, reports Shashwati Shankar.

Players from varied sectors from content-focused Meraki and SpectraVr to pure hardware and software players like Tesseract and Absentia are focusing on building content production or aggregation services as brand interest in integrating VR tech picks up.

"One year ago the VR content was minimal, cost of production was high, distribution models were unclear, getting into this space was dangerous but now brands are increasingly looking at integrating VR, viewing it as a novel concept," said Sushant Baliga, founder of SpectraVR.

The startup which was recently funded by US venture capital firm Rothenberg Ventures, concentrates on filmmaking-oriented VR content for brands ranging from Kingfisher to automobile clients like Mercedes Benz and Maruti Suzuki.

The most popular VR content brands appear to be adopting the 360 degree VR videos that create an immersive experience, enabling the end user to get a realistic feeling of being in the place captured.

The startup has managed to get up to 30 clients in the last one year on a project basis.

"Brands are now opening up to integrating VR and are starting off with 360 degree VR videos, these especially became popular after Mark Zuckerburg posted such a video on Facebook last year, but there’s an ocean of cool features and services that can be integrated through VR that are yet to be experimented with in India," said Parth Choksi, cofounder of Meraki.

The startup has created videos for live music festivals like Sunburn in Goa, short independent film Phobia, and live streaming cricket for Star Sports.

Similarly, hardware and software VR tech players like Tesseract Imaging and Astarc Ventures-backed Absentia also aim to dabble in the content production space. Tesseract is currently creating a camera that is being referred to as VCam that will record 360-degree style virtual-reality videos and will soon be available for consumers.

"The important thing is we are also looking at being able to record virtual reality audio as well as video, audio is something that gets missed out on in the VR experience, the device is currently in the R&D space but will go into manufacturing by next month," said Kshitij Marwah, founder of Tesseract Imaging.

Likely to be priced at around Rs 50,000, it will be available within the next three months.

The bootstrapped startup works with about 15 clients in India, the US, Denmark and Brazil with Makemytrip.com being an important client in India.